The Rivera Court in the Detroit Institute of Arts is one of the DIA's treasures. / Richard Lee/Detroit Free Press

Written by

Ford W. Bell

Detroit Free Press guest writer

Ford W. Bell

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Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr has taken on a Herculean task.

He must untangle decades of mismanagement and bureaucratic negligence and devise a way for the city to meet its obligations to, among others, private contractors and hundreds of police officers, firefighters and civil servants who dedicated their careers to Detroit. To do so, he must view every potential solution and option dispassionately in order to elaborate a fair and balanced plan to pay the staggering debt and do what is best for the city. What he should not do is view the stunning collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts as a fungible asset, available to satisfy the city’s creditors.

From a business standpoint, museums are prohibited from regarding objects in their collections — whether works of art, paleolithic fossils or the giraffes at the Detroit Zoo — as assets to be sold in tough times to fix the boiler or balance the books. The Code of Ethics of the American Alliance of Museums states that museums can sell objects in their collections at any time. The crux of the matter is what happens to the proceeds from such sales. Such proceeds cannot be used to balance the budget or pay off debts.

That’s because museum collections are held in the public trust, there to serve the community. The DIA has one of the world’s finest, encompassing some 60,000 works in a range of media that span the arc of civilization and tell the story of human creativity over centuries.

In fact, the Federal Accounting Standards Board decided years ago that museum collections should not be viewed as assets on a balance sheet, precisely because these items are held in the public trust. Can you imagine if the DIA and other great museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Smithsonian Institution, had to tally up the value of their vast collections every year? It would not only make them, on paper, among the richest institutions in society, but make it nearly impossible for these bastions of culture to raise funds for public programs. Of course, many museums around the country have sizable budgets, but that’s because donors and corporate supporters see them as invaluable civic anchors, core educational institutions and sources of civic pride.

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One might ask, with 60,000 works in its collection, couldn’t the DIA sell just a few to help pay down Detroit’s staggering debts? It seems logical on the surface. But it would not only be a violation of the public trust in which collections are held, it would also be a dispersal of as-yet hidden knowledge. Museums collect because one can never predict what future scholars might learn from works in the collection. If put on the market, the DIA collection could disappear forever — and its knowledge with it.

Cultural institutions are also magnets for new businesses. Companies want their employees to be surrounded by a thriving cultural environment, and museums are a vital part of that.

And that is how the DIA meets the definition of an “asset.” The DIA and its fabulous collection can be a pillar in the building of a future Detroit. Cultural tourism is a $192-billion industryin the United States, and cultural tourists have been shown to spend more and stay longer that other visitors. An empty edifice stripped of the DIA’s art will not attract any tourists of any kind.

But the people of metro Detroit have already figured out what kind of asset they have in the DIA. They expressed that at the ballot box last August, committing that increasingly rare act of voting to tax themselves to support the museum. And one year later, in August 2013, they voted again — with their feet — as 40,000 visitors came to the DIA, twice the norm for that time of year.

The Detroit Institute of Arts is indeed an asset, but not the kind Orr referenced last week. The DIA is, and will be, an asset that pays huge dividends to the city of Detroit, helping to create and sustain the renaissance that is to come, for all Detroiters.